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Are you a strad person or a guarneri person?
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The Challenge of the Solo: The Baroque Violin - Christopher Hogwood & Pavlo Beznosiuk
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A wide variety of music, including some by Bach, was sent into the far reaches of outer space on the two Voyager Spacecraft in the 1970s. When eminent biologist and auther Lewis Thomas was asked what music he would want to sent from Earth into outer space, he answered, "I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach." After a pause, he added, "But that would be boasting."

"Without Bach, God would be a complete second rate figure. Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe can not be regarded a complete failure" -- Emil Cioran
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Great Composers - Bach (BBC, 1997), Part 1/7

Part 4/7
"Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Schumann- they played this music everyday.... Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Weber, and Liszt- all of them learned how to compose by playing Bach on the piano."

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Joshua Bell on Bach (Chaconne)

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Alexander Markov With Tips For Playing Bach (Adagio)

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Url: http://www.sheilascorner.com/bach.html"Bach as a Violinist - One point which has been debated over the years is the level of Bach's own violin playing and in particular whether he or anybody else at that time was good enough to play these pieces. I suggest three arguments in support of his performance ambition: First of all, there are fingerings in the manuscripts, which indicates that practical performance was at some point attempted. Secondly, I find it incredible that anybody could look at Bach's education and job history and assume that he was anything less than an excellent violinist. His first instrument was the violin - he began with his father at the age of six, before studying any keyboard instruments. He worked his way through school playing the violin, his first employment after school was as a violinist, and just prior to his position in Cöthen he was employed as Konzertmeister in Weimar, a court with a rich violin tradition. His keyboard writing certainly is testimony to the general physical co-ordination of his fingers, and we know from today's young virtuosi the residual ease of technique which comes from early study. He probably did not have the brilliance of more celebrated virtuosi; in particular the solo sonata by Pisendel demands more ease in high positions than Bach requires, the ability to stretch a tenth, and also some tricks of staccato bowing. The most salient difficulty in Bach's pieces is the complexity of his unusual double stopping, which take full advantage of closed positions. But this had been part of German violin tradition since Biber, and that is the third point: that many of the physical difficulties that later (Italian-trained) violinists have found in these pieces were not necessarily so problematic for Bach, who seems to have been quite at home with the most complicated left hand movements. In my opinion these pieces were definitely intended for practical performance."
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Hilary Hahn "Voice and Violin"

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Gidon Kremer "Back to Bach"
"These (Bach's works) are important works to which you keep returning because the are the wellspring of all music. And so I felt an increasing desire to return to Bach. I can't account for it logically. I am not trying to say anything important here. At some point I felt the need to play this music again."

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What other kinds of "class projects" has Midori devised?

"Bach
Week is another class project," she said. For Midori's 30th anniversary
of her debut in 2013, she had her own Bach project: recording and performing the Bach solo Sonatas and Partitas. (The recording will likely come out something in the next 18 months, her publicist said.)

"For
(my) Bach Project, for instance, I sometimes utilized the Bach Week we
had as a class," Midori said. "I'd been preparing, specifically with
this Bach Project in mind, for the last four or five years. One year I
played only the Sonatas, and I played them, No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3. Some
years I played just four of them. One year I played five in one
sitting, no break."

"I learned so much from being able to play
Bach as a piece," she said. Students, who are often fearful of playing
Bach, can also learn from playing it in more of a performance setting,
"not as an audition, where you play one or two movements at most, and
only parts of it."

During Bach week, they have to play the
complete Sonata or Partita, with repeats. "They can't just play the
Chaconne, for instance, they have to play the entire D minor, if that's
going to be their Bach," she said. They have to play that whole piece a
minimum of three times that week -- more if they'd like. "Older ones,
sometimes they like to do two, or three. But if they are doing two
works, one Partita and one Sonata, for the three performances, they have
to always play this couple. It's building stamina, too. That's how I
build my stamina."